Horror

Happy Death Day can be summed up with Groundhog Day with a slasher. This is not a bad thing.

Just like Groundhog Day, the protagonist, Tree – yes that is her name, is not sympathetic at first. But his changes as she goes through the day over and over.

The most annoying thing in the movie – her ringtone. And since the day is repeating, we hear the damn thing over and over.

The movie opens with Tree waking up hungover in some guy’s dorm room. She quickly leaves and returns to her sorority house. She interacts with her roommate and other members and goes to class. She is of course having an affair with a professor. All of this is basically setup to introduce us to the key characters in her life, the events we will be seeing variations of, and her crappy demeanor.

Then she gets killed. By someone in a Baby mask. Apparently, her college’s mascot is a baby. So there are a lot of people out and about in similar masks.

She wakes up and repeats the day. And she dies.

At this point, she begins working to figure out who is after her.

There is no real gore. It is a PG-13 rated movie, after all. But it was a nice fun movie. Not a sequel. Not a remake.

The trailer for the Belko Experiment pretty much lays out the plot. Office workers get locked in their building and have to jump through murdery hoops to “win”. A lot like Battle Royale except it does not start out as a free-for-all. The man behind the intercom wants them to start out slow and kill a couple of people.

We are briefly introduced to a lot of the 80 office workers. You can kind of guess who are important to the story based on the time spent each character’s introduction. It is one poor woman’s first day of work, too.

After Martin’s father is killed by a mysterious presence in the dark, he starts having trouble sleeping at night. School officials notice him sleeping in class and attmept to call his mother, Sophie, but cannot get an answer. They call his sister, Rebecca, and she comes to pick him up. We learn that Rebecca had distanced herself from her mother and her father went away because of her mother’s mental issues when she goes off her meds. Turns out the mother has a friend named Diana that does not like lights. Rebecca, her boyfriend Bret, and Martin look into Sophie’s past for a hint on the very real, very supernatural, Diana. We get jump scares galore and an ending that leaves room for a sequel, but has satisfying closure regardless.

TL;DR: Fun movie with Jump Scares and an ending that goes to places you do not normally go to. See it with a crowd in the theater.